Formula One Grand Prix, 28 October 1984

Eighteen years ago Formula One was full of intriguing characters, and the championship was still alive in late October. The perfect time, then, to send TV critic and grand prix junkie Clive James to report on a thrilling finale

Sunday 6 October 2002Observer Sport Monthly

Before dawn last Sunday the vendors of cakes and fizzy drinks were in position beside the road leading to the circuit at Estoril. They weren't rich, and in the morning most of the people who bought what they had to sell weren't rich either. A lot of people came by car but almost as many came on foot, looking bedraggled and stepping carefully, because not all the mud had dried to dust.

Slogans daubed on walls exhort the Portuguese to live always in the spirit of some day or other in April. It's a worthy sentiment, but the occasional splurge can't hurt. The international grand prix circus is the biggest splurge there is. 'Blam blam!' yelled an outlandish engine being tested in the distance. Money was being burnt. The traffic jam inched impatiently towards it. The pedestrians shuffled dust. The police were outnumbered - always a sign, in Portugal, that the crowd must be very large.

Sustained by drinks and cakes, the punters filled the grandstands to be regaled by one last morning of untimed practice. Grid positions had already been decided but here was an indication of how fast the cars would go in race trim. Niki Lauda needed this practice because the engine of his McLaren had been giving no end of trouble and if he finished more than one place behind his team-mate Alain Prost the world championship could still slip away. Prost seemed to have the race sewn up, unless the unlikely occurred and Nelson Piquet's Brabham held together.

The cars all look like a bobsleigh being humped by a lawnmower but luckily they advertise different things. The red and white McLarens are mobile hoardings for Marlboro. The blue Brabhams plug Parmalat sliced ham. Only the Ferraris look exactly like themselves - bright red and very pretty. They even make a pretty sound, loud but sweet like an apocalyptic coffee grinder.

The Renaults were loudest and not sweet at all. Punters without earplugs found their knees turning to jelly. Derek Warwick and Patrick Tambay drove the Renaults very quickly but nobody believed they would hold together.

All this determinism was academic, however, because fortune, in Formula One, has no tides that can't turn as fast as dice can roll. It is true that you can do everything right and everything will still go wrong, but it is equally true that even the best laid plans sometimes work out. Only two years ago the Williams team had been so dominant that they had lingered too long before switching to turbo engines. They would know how to deal with success if their recent marriage with Honda suddenly came right. The Williams pit was full of Japanese mechanics wearing the green and white overalls of the Saudi sponsor.

The Williams drivers, Jacques Lafitte and Keke Rosberg, are French and Finnish respectively. The car is still not quite all there but Lafitte had been going fast and Rosberg faster still, although his car had done all it could to stop him.

Practice ended and the cars came in to be either confidently polished during the lunchtime hiatus or else frantically rebuilt. An RAF Harrier performed prodigies of mid-air dressage. The policemen looked up longingly at such a potentially definitive instrument of crowd control.

When the cars came out of the pits after lunch, Nigel Mansell's Lotus had 'Good luck Nigel' chalked on its tyres. Next year he drives for Williams but he looked keen to depart in glory. They all parked on the grid and settled down for the mandatory half hour of being swamped by the media. Tunnelling through the legs of photographers, I arrived at the side of Piquet's pole-position Brabham to find the still current world champion strapped into the cockpit and being consoled for the pressures of fame by Emanuela, the girl who gives out an Italian motorscooter to every polesitter and who has by now given Piquet so many motorscooters that she has become part of his life. She gently caressed one of his gloves and stared deep into his tinted visor.

The French media, as always, focused on Prost to the exclusion of the world. For him it was a dubious privilege, because those chaps would have woken Napoleon for an interview on the night before Waterloo. Much farther back, Lauda said only the necessary. Mr Minimax long ago found the secret of hiding without running. You can get near him, but you can't get to him.

Twenty-six engines fired at once and the field toured round the circuit while the Portuguese fans told their girlfriends by sign language that this wasn't the race, it was only the warm-up lap. Then the green light shone and it was the race. The clutch dropped on a grand total of at least 15,000 unmuffled horsepower. Piquet was slow off the mark and Rosberg came belting through behind Prost, then beside him, then past him into the first corner. Trying hard to restore his squandered advantage, Piquet overdid it and spun. By the time he had straightened himself out he was far down the field, which was led for the early laps by Rosberg, Prost, Mansell and Ayrton Senna, a young man who has made the Toleman look fast and might stun the world next year when he goes to Lotus.

Lauda was way back, stuck in traffic. At the front, Rosberg's turbo spat flame in Prost's face but the dream couldn't last. Prost's McLaren was simply less of a handful and he took Rosberg without trouble at about the same time Mansell put in the fastest lap and got set to take Rosberg in his turn. But Rosberg had not forgotten how Mansell held him up in Dallas. Nor was the Finn thrilled by the prospect of having the abrasive Englishman for a team-mate next year. When Mansell moved out to go past Rosberg he found Rosberg behaving as if Mansell wasn't there. Mansell had to drop back smartly or face totalisation at 190 mph plus. Really the two of them should try to have a drink together this Christmas.

Eventually Mansell passed Rosberg and established himself not all that far behind Prost, who was romping along an open road. Lauda was back in eighth behind Johansson's Toleman. Lauda was up against it. The gap between him and Prost lengthened to 27 seconds.

The race was more than a third over, a dozen laps went by with Lauda still stuck, and Prost's lead over him stretched to 33 seconds. On every lap at the same spot, Lauda pulled out beside Johansson but couldn't outbrake him. In a similar crisis at the Nurburgring, Lauda had got impatient and spun, but not making the same mistake twice is one of the secrets of his mastery.

Precious time went by while he waited for his chance. Things happened to other people, but nothing happened to Lauda. Then it did: he saw daylight and went through it. By now he was 42 seconds adrift from Prost but he was a place closer. Then Alboreto went backwards, de Angelis's Lotus did the same and Lauda was three places closer: Prost, Mansell, Senna, Rosberg, Lauda.

Mansell, however, was still only half a straight behind Prost. Standing at the pit wall while Mansell went past down the straight was a character building experience, because to dodge the bumps on the grandstand edge of the track he came booming down the near side right under your nose, obviously with every intention of winning the race. If he did that and demoted Prost to second place it would be OK by Lauda, but for Mansell to finish between Prost and Lauda would give the championship to Prost.

None of this would apply of course, if Lauda couldn't get past Rosberg and Senna. But Rosberg by now had done the impossible too long, which left Senna. Lauda went past Senna and that made Mansell the key man. Only if Prost came second could Lauda take the championship from third place. So Lauda must have been willing Mansell onward even as he chased him. The statistics said that Mansell's Lotus would fall apart, but what if they weren't right?

Lauda was 27 seconds behind Mansell with about that many laps to go. If he chased too hard, Lauda might break something. If he didn't chase hard enough, and Mansell's car failed to disintegrate, the championship was lost. Both boldness and caution were thus Lauda's enemies. He held steady through the mental turmoil. Standing at the pit wall and bracing myself for the usual shock of Mansell's transition down the straight, I suddenly discovered him arriving in the pits behind me. The piston in one of his front brakes had jumped out of its calipers. He stepped out of the car and disappeared under an avalanche of media. When the Lotus mechanics dug him out I asked him, perhaps tactlessly, for a one-word interview. He gave it to me.

At 60 laps with 10 to go, it was Prost, Lauda and the rest. Lauda was 40 seconds behind Prost but it could have been 400 as long as his car held together. Both of them turned down the boost to save fuel and avoid stress. The Grand Prix year spiralled gently to an end. Prost won the race and Lauda won the championship. The new boy won the battle and the old hand won the war.

On the victory dais, Prost, Lauda and Senna spurted champagne over one another's overalls, which advertised Marlboro cigarettes. None of them actually smokes but the advertiser is no doubt confident that the consumer will fail to draw the relevant conclusion. Prost behaved impeccably, smiling with a mouth full of aloes.

Rosberg, the only heavy smoker in the field, was eighth. Piquet finished a lap behind. Mechanical unreliability had cost him the season but losing this race might for once have been his fault. He looked sallow, but then he always does: not just from adrenalin poisoning but because of danger from young women.

The last I saw of Piquet, he had taken refuge in the back of the Brabham team transporter while the Portuguese young ladies came at him three deep. Not three deep one behind the other: three deep one on top of each other. He was still their world champion. While Piquet signed the programmes, T-shirts and bared wrists of the lucky ones, Portuguese policemen threw the unlucky ones out of the van into the struggling mass below. Crowd control had at last come into its own.